Member-only story
Her Spotted Face Broke My Heart
My sister, Joanne, passed away last week. She’d been in hospice care for a couple of weeks, her body slowly shutting down. She was eighty-three and knew she wasn’t going home. Her daughter told me she’d been confused and out of it during their last visit.
Hearing the news brought back all my childhood memories of her. When Jody, as we called her, was a toddler, she and our mother lived in our grandparents’ house in Massachusetts while my father was away during World War II.
One day, our mother took the then four-year-old to the beach and left her alone for no more than thirty minutes. Where our mother went, or why she left a child alone, was never fully explained. When she came back, the sun had burned dark-brown freckles on the little girl’s pale Irish skin.
I always questioned my mother’s version of events. The Massachusetts sun wasn’t that strong. But she believed in keeping secrets and never changed her story.
The freckles were real, dark, and only on one side of the child’s face. It was as if a ghostly hand had drawn a line from her forehead down to her chin—dark brown spots on one side, not a single one on the other.
My father came home from the war, and I was born a year later.
Jody was just my sister to me, and I loved her. She was part of my family, and…
